Post-Communist Russia

A Second Darkness

Few folk in the West know just how relentlessly the Soviet regime persecuted the Orthodox Church, in the attempt to obliterate Christianity off the face of the Russias.  It's worth remembering:

Lenin seemed to have taken in earnest Voltaire's jocular remark that the era of human happiness would begin when the last king was strangled in the entrails of the last priest.  And so Lenin and Stalin destroyed or diverted to the use of the Soviet state over 90 percent of Russia's 96,000 churches and killed over 90 percent of its 112,000 Russian priests.  The rest were thoroughly infiltrated by the Cheka and its follower, the KGB, and were forbidden to proselytize or even to preach.

And indeed, this remnant church did its best to function as a transmission belt for the regime, persecuting priests who took their jobs seriously.  The Bible and religious literature were banned.  Meetings for religious purposes or religious conversations were cause for one-way trips to Siberia.

. . . . the extent to which the regime succeeded in destroying the spiritual bases of family, faith, property and law is less interesting than the reasons why it did not succeed even more.  The short answer seems to be that the campaign quickly drove millions of Russians to nihilism and that nihilism is unendurable for very long.  Visitors to the Soviet Union in the era of glasnost encountered a cynicism so deep and widespread, misanthropy so bitter, that even the most ardent communists had become frightened of it.

. . . . The constant flow of priests beaten and jailed for trying to do their job and the very existence of churches that were obviously muzzled reminded the masses that there was an alternative to the regime's morality, more attractive because forbidden.  The regime said the Church was corrupt.  But the masses knew that the regime was.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 93f.]

Fast forward to modern times.

Progress Against Civil Asset Forfeiture, Part I

Chopping Away At Leviathan

The practice of civil asset forfeiture in the United States has evolved into an unjust evil. Now, it appears that the consciences of some in authority have woken up.  Slowly the practice is being wound back, state by state.  Civil forfeiture is something Christians need to work against as they have opportunity.

Below is a Fact Sheet summary of the practice of civil forfeiture, as provided by the Heritage Foundation.  Part II, to follow, will describe the progress that is being made in rolling the pernicious practice back.

Civil Asset Forfeiture: 7 Things You Should Know

1. What is civil asset forfeiture?

Civil asset forfeiture is a legal tool that allows law enforcement officials to seize property that they assert has been involved in certain criminal activity. In fact, the owner of the property doesn’t even need to be guilty of a crime: Civil asset forfeiture proceedings charge the property itself with involvement in a crime. This means that police can seize your car, home, money, or valuables without ever having to charge you with a crime. There are many, many stories of innocent people being stripped of their money and property by law enforcement.

Iterative Tyranny

The Evil Empire

When President Nixon notoriously intoned "we are all Keynsians now" he was right, although it still grates to admit the truth of his statement.  We can add another "we are all . . . now" statement, equally offensive, but just as true.  We are all socialists now.  The Fabian socialists have carried the day.  Fabianism--the doctrine of socialism not via revolution (a la Lenin) but by gradual iteration--has won out.

Every Western nation today is fundamentally socialist in their orientation and bent.  All agree that the government must redistribute the wealth, income, and capital of everyone to the benefit of some, which in turn is forged upon the anvil of the state being the ultimate owner of all property.  Doubtless this is unsurprising.  Materialism, the belief that only matter exists, leads to atheism, which leads to statism because there is no higher power than the state anywhere in the universe.  Ultimately the state is right because might makes right.

Advocates of Fabianism will insist that this is an unfair characterisation of their position.  They have long believed in democracy, not brute totalitarian power.  They have advocated for persuasion and the ballot box.  But for many Fabians this is merely a means to an end.  Right from the very beginning the Fabians secretly admired the absolute ruthlessness of Lenin and Soviet Communism.  They would have loved to have such power, such totalitarian control.  Given the opportunity, the Fabians would have opted for totalitarian control in a heart beat.  They were gradualists, not by choice, but by necessity.  Gradualism was a tactic, not an ethic.

Letter From the UK (About a Sinister Court)

A 'sinister court’ mocks justice again

The workings of the mysterious and ultra-secretive Court of Protection are a national scandal 

Christopher Booker

The Telegraph

31 January, 2015

[We have published several pieces recently on the decline of civil liberties in the UK, and the stirrings of an authoritarian state.  Christopher Booker writes of another instance of Leviathan stirring to life. Ed.]

My article on January 3, headlined “The most sinister court in Britain strikes yet again”, has for the past month been the “Most Viewed” Comment item on the Telegraph website. Its theme was the workings of the mysterious and ultra-secretive Court of Protection, which has only recently begun to emerge from the shadows – that’s thanks to the stalwart efforts of our top family judge, Lord Justice Munby, to lift something of the suffocating veil of secrecy shrouding the courts over which he now presides.

My report centred on the astonishing treatment of Kathleen Danby, a 72-year-old grandmother, who first hit the headlines last year when it was revealed that – two months earlier – she had been sentenced in her absence to three months in prison by Judge Martin Cardinal, for breaking an injunction by hugging her granddaughter who had run away from “care” 170 times.

Leviathan Stirs

NSA surveillance goes beyond Orwell's imagination – Alan Rusbridger

Guardian editor says depth of NSA surveillance programs greatly exceed anything the 1984 author could have imagined

The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything in George Orwell's 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday.

Speaking in the wake of a series of revelations in the Guardian about the extent of the National Security Agency's surveillance operations, Rusbridger said: "Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this, this concept of scooping up everything all the time.

"This is something potentially astonishing about how life could be lived and the limitations on human freedom," he said.

Read More:

The Ugly Leftist

How Happy is That Man . . . 

Chris Trotter, arguably New Zealand's most prominent left wing columnist/theoretician, has recently written the following:

I once concluded an editorial in the NZ Political Review with the following observation:

“There is a paradox here. Conservative political culture, whose raison d’etre is the preservation of social inequality and economic exploitation (not to mention the institutional violence these things create and upon which ruling class power rests) tends to produce individuals of considerable personal charm and genuine liberality. While radical culture, which sets its face against the violence and injustice of entrenched privilege, all too often produces individuals who are aggressive, intolerant and utterly indifferent to the suffering which their relentless quest for justice causes.
“In short, the Right treats humanity like cattle and individual human-beings like princes, while the Left loves humanity with a passion but treats individuals like shit.”

Somewhere there must be an algorithm that delivers the best of both worlds.

I’m still looking.  (H/T Kiwiblog)

Apart from Chris's continuing quest for  the Holy Grail--for which we wish him bon chance--what are we to make of his observations?

Our Orwellian World

NZ Herald columnist, John Roughan reflects on the outrage being expressed against a government's electronic spying on its own citizens.  He argues that while the spying is not particularly welcome, it is a necessary price we pay in a world where (Islamic) terrorists are able to operate far more secretively, with less footprint than in previous ages.  

The terrorism of 40 years ago was different from today's in one important respect. Those holding hostages at Entebbe or the Munich Olympics didn't want to die. That means they needed an organisation, facilities for negotiating, backchannels, lines of escape, a country of refuge. They had something for spies to watch.

Today's suicide bombers have no such organisation. With the inspiration of 9/11 they need only some knowledge of explosives and detonation, readily available on the net. They can live quietly and unobtrusively in a modern city until their chosen hour.  All things considered, it is remarkable there have not been more explosions like those in the London underground in 2005 and at the Boston marathon this year. If access to phone and internet logs has helped prevent more of them, the spies are welcome to mine.

It's generous of John to welcome the spies to his own phone and internet logs.